The Pavelle Family Christmas Display has been great shtick since the 1980’s! We make anywhere from 2-3 dozen different kinds of cookies per year, keep a tithe for the house, and give the rest away in tight-packed tins to coworkers, friends, family members, clients, and all the people who’ve done us a good turn during the year. Merchants in Pittsburgh’s Strip District start asking about the cookie list in September! No one wants to be left off.
How bad does it get? Behold this year’s (2017) insert!
It takes a lot of planning! Here is our progress list as of December 7th of 2019:
That’s a little crazier than usual because we’ve been recipe testing for the book, but not by a huge amount. You get the idea.
I-N-S-A-N-I-T-Y!
I (Scott) think it goes back to Kate being a first generation immigrant. Her family escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1979. It’s not easy to leave your home, even when there’s communism behind you and America up ahead. Home is home. Once a year though, when the smells and tastes of childhood return… Well, our home in Pittsburgh turns into “Home” with a capital-H and Kate smiles a smile you just don’t see at other times in the year.
It’s something that we who love her look forward to more than the cookies themselves.
It wasn’t long before I (the primary obsessive in this enterprise) discovered that every other immigrant has the exact same reaction, and native-born Americans do it too. Southwesterners melt for Bizcochitos. New Yorkers melt for Black & Whites and Linzer Tarts. Watch someone from Ohio when you offer a Buckeye! I smile at the memory alone. People from Argentina, Peru, Venezuela and Cuba positively dissolve for Alfajores. We could go on forever. Or at least long enough to fill in a really good book…
Most books on the market offer creative recipes that expand the very definition of a “cookie”. Smoked cocoa nibs… new combinations… novel techniques… The art and attention that people devote to those books is amazing! We offer something different: tried, tested and perfected versions of those old classics from around the globe.
People have been after us to write a book of our recipes for more than 20 years. Now, with just a bit of help, we’re going to do it.